1 One Long Night, 1936–38

The Arc of Repression

Located at the extreme northern tip of what is today the Komi Republic, roughly two hundred kilometres south of Baydaratskaya Bay on the Kara Sea, Vorkuta is further north than Great Bear Lake, Repulse Bay, or Bathurst Inlet in Canada.8 As a settled area in the far reaches of the Arctic, Inuvik, on the Mackenzie River delta, might be offered as a point of comparison. But Inuvik remains an administrative centre, the population of which has rarely exceeded 3,500. In contrast, by 1993, Vorkuta had a population of 217,000, with most of its workers employed in the 13 coal mines that surrounded the city.9 By 2013, the population of the town had plummeted to just 96,000, but this was still far greater than any comparable Arctic settlement in Canada.10

Vorkuta is a forbidding place. Some of its inhabitants in 1993 described the climate as “twelve months of winter, followed by summer.” In the words of one resident, “after ten years here you stop being human because of the cold, depression, polar nights, tough work.”11 Joseph Scholmer—a German communist arrested in 1949 and sent to Vorkuta—recalled the “old hands” telling him: “You mustn’t stay here too long. It’s a murderous climate. Anyone who stays here too long gets the guts knocked out of him.”12 So grim are the environs that, when advisors to Tsar Nicholas I proposed that “he should make the territory around the rivers Petchora and Vorkuta into a colony for exiles, he sent for a report on conditions there and decided that it was ‘too much to demand of any man that he should live there.’”13

Vorkuta first entered the pages of history as prison ground and massacre site for thousands of socialists who opposed the rise to power of Stalin and his bureaucracy. The introductory chapter laid out the horrendous statistics of repression for 1937 and 1938—681,692 “documentable” executions carried out by the Stalinist state in those terrible years.14 Vorkuta was a principal site of that state-organized terror. In impossible conditions, anti-Stalinist socialists—many of them followers of Leon Trotsky—fought to uphold the ideals of the Russian Revolution. They fought with their bodies, launching a series of mass hunger strikes, some of which they actually won—at least in the near term.

In fact, their victories were the very definition of pyrrhic. Almost to a person, these anti-Stalinist socialists were executed, most in what came to be known as the “Kashketin executions,” so called because they were overseen by Efim Iosifovich Kashketin, a senior staff member with the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.15 Robert Conquest tells us that only children aged twelve and under escaped execution.16 This is confirmed by the account of an extraordinary eyewitness to these awful events, Ivan Mitrofanovich Khoroshev, writing under one of his several pseudonyms “M.B.” The real identity of M.B. was only discovered after Khoroshev’s death in early 1991.17 Born in 1904, he had been sentenced in 1936 to six years in the Gulag on charges of “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” In October 1991, just months after his death, he was officially rehabilitated. Khoroshev writes: “At the time of execution of a male prisoner, his imprisoned wife was automatically liable to capital punishment; and when it was a question of well-known members of the Opposition, this applied equally to any of his children over the age of twelve.”18 Once Kashketin’s work was done, he was in turn imprisoned and executed, a fate that befell many of those who were instruments of the terror. Mikhail Baitalsky captures the terrible irony, saying that several months after overseeing the slaughter in Vorkuta, Kashketin was heard shouting from a prison in the area: “Tell the people that I am Kashketin! I am the one who shot all the enemies of the people at Vorkuta! Tell the people!”19

The victims of this slaughter were part of a whole layer of Russian socialists who opposed the Stalin regime. Arriving at estimates for the size of this opposition is difficult, but the numbers clearly ran into the thousands. In October 1923, the “Declaration of the 46,” one of the first opposition documents, was supported by half the party cells in Moscow, one-third of the cells in the army, and a majority of the students in the communist cells of Moscow’s institutions of higher learning.20 The years 1924 and 1925 were years of stalemate, when Trotsky’s advice was “do nothing, don’t reveal ourselves at all, maintain our connections, protect our cadres from 1923, let Zinoviev wear himself out.”21 According to Pierre Broué, during those years, the Trotskyist opposition in Leningrad might have numbered “just a few dozen,” but “it was something else altogether” in Moscow, where the opposition claimed some “five hundred members, very well organized. There, the Bolshevik-Leninists [Trotskyists] knew that they had an absolute majority in the factory and army cells.”22 Roland Gaucher estimates that from 1926 to 1928, the United Opposition—now including Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had been pushed into opposition to Stalin—had some seven to eight thousand activists across the whole Soviet Union, much the same as the number of activists who formed the core of the Stalin-Bukharin bloc, which had replaced the earlier Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin troika.23 There was, of course, one important difference: the Stalinist activists had the resources of the state and the party at their disposal, while the anti-Stalinist activists had only their own wits and initiative. In 1927, in the teeth of intensifying repression, the United Opposition platform received some four to five thousand signatures. At the beginning of 1929, the anti-Stalinist opposition estimated that “between 2,000 and 3,000 of its members were in captivity, but this approximate figure was later raised to 5,000.”24 Gus Fagan, in 1980, put the figure at between 6,000 and 8,000.25

This socialist, anti-Stalinist opposition found, from time to time, a hearing inside the mass of the working class. Michal Reiman argues that although many underestimate the importance of this opposition, “one can hardly agree with such views: they seem paradoxical indeed in light of the mountain of ammunition expended on the opposition by the party leadership in those years.”26 He goes on to argue that in 1926, “opposition activity was spreading like a river in flood”:

The opposition organized mass meetings of industrial workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Leningrad and Moscow; at a chemical plant in Moscow shouts were heard, “Down with Stalin’s dictatorship, down with the Politburo!”

There were rumours of underground strike committees, in which the opposition were said to be participating, in the Urals, the Donbass, the Moscow textile region and Moscow proper—and of funds being raised for striking workers.27

Sergei Ivlev, a Left Oppositionist imprisoned with Khoroshev in the 1930s, told of an electric United Opposition meeting he helped organize in Moscow in the autumn of 1927. A former student of Moscow Higher Technical School, he obtained a key to the largest auditorium at the school, saying that he needed it for a geography club meeting.

At seven o’clock in the evening, as soon as I opened the auditorium, crowds of students and worker-oppositionists began arriving from all over Moscow, having been notified in advance through their organisers. There were more than three thousand of them. The auditorium and the adjoining corridor were filled to capacity. Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev attended the meeting. Unusual enthusiasm and unanimity prevailed at this meeting. The opposition leaders' fiery words landed on fertile soil.

When the authorities cut off the electricity, plunging the auditorium into darkness, the meeting organizers were prepared, handing out sterno candles collected in advance. “And when L. B. Kamenev, the chairman of the meeting, solemnly proclaimed: ‘Let us dispel the Stalinist gloom with Leninist light!’—dozens of candles were lit in different parts of the audience to enthusiastic applause.” The authorities escalated and rounded up “reliable men” to help them break up the meeting. But when the several thousand “ostensible Stalinist supporters” arrived, they stood around passively, “and some of them even joined the oppositionists. After finishing the meeting, the oppositionists left the auditorium singing, and lined up in two dense columns in the corridor and courtyard. Under their protection Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev marched unhindered to their cars.”28

Even in the early 1930s, when Stalinist repression was gathering steam and the bulk of Trotsky’s Left Opposition had been driven into exile or sent to the Gulag, a workers’ opposition continued, looking to the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky as a counter to Stalinist oppression. Aleksandra Chumakova provided an eyewitness account of one such episode. As a party worker in the Moscow Committee, she “was not in the Opposition,” but “her husband was, and her fate was linked to his and to that of other Oppositionists close to them.”29 In 1932, she was sent to the Glukhovka textile mill, the oldest textile mill in Russia, to investigate complaints about working and living conditions. This was not an insignificant mill. It was in the Ivanovo district, not far from Moscow, and had a long tradition of working-class militancy, having played a critical role in the 1917 revolution. As Chumakova reports:

When I arrived at the factory I was immediately struck by the horrifying unrelieved poverty of the workers. Gaunt from hunger, they were barely able to get to work and stand up at their machines for the allotted eight hours. Through the streets of the factory settlement wandered the starving, emaciated children of the workers. They gathered around the garbage cans of the factory dining hall and waited for something edible to be thrown out. The textile workers would call their children into the dining halls and share with them the one bowl of soup allowed each worker per day….

The Glukhovka workers had no respect for Stalin. During the 1932 May Day demonstration they had carried portraits of Lenin and Trotsky through the streets of the settlement and had shouted angry phrases against Stalin.30

This bitterness and anger moved from demonstrations to strikes, which were fiercely repressed.31

Precisely because the arguments of the Trotskyists had a hearing inside the working class, the repression against them was fierce. It was, in Maria Joffe’s words, “one long night.”32 The darkest pit of that night was in the Gulag, in which were deposited millions of peasants who had defended their land and hundreds of thousands of communists who fought the rise of Stalin.

By 1936, the great majority of former Oppositionists had “capitulated,” many of them in words only in order to preserve their lives and jobs. Joseph Berger describes the lifestyle of those Trotskyists who capitulated in the early 1930s and who were, temporarily, allowed to live and work in relative freedom:

There was something wild about them in those days. At their famous parties, vodka flowed and an old gypsy song was sung with the refrain: “We’ll booze away the lot, but we’ll keep the concertina, and we’ll make the bitches dance to our tune!” The concertina was their inner freedom, their integrity, their secret ideological “core.” It was the justification of their hymns to Stalin, of their denial of the spirit of October, which they knew they were helping the “bitches” to bury. It was recklessly ignored that every tenth guest at the party was an agent who would be reporting what they said.33

Capitulation, however, would provide only a temporary reprieve. All would ultimately share the fate of the irreconcilables, the “hard core of uncompromising Trotskyists, most of them in prisons and camps.”34 According to Pierre Broué, Genrikh Yagoda, director of the NKVD, “proposed to Stalin the arrest of all the Trotskyists in exile and deporting them to the most distant camps of the Gulag, Vorkuta and Kolyma-Magadan.”35 Berger adds a third camp to the list, saying of the Trotskyists that in mid-1936, “they and their families had all been rounded up … and concentrated in three large camps—Kolyma, Vorkuta and Noril’sk.”36

These three places of exile were grim indeed. Kolyma, the vast Siberian district in the far northeast of the Russian landmass, had a reputation for being home to the deadliest of the camps in the Gulag.37 Travel some three thousand kilometres west from Kolyma, and you would encounter the camps centred around Noril’sk, roughly three hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle. Travel another eleven hundred kilometres west, and you would finally reach the camps at Vorkuta. A line connecting the three extermination centres would describe a vast arc stretching across some of the most forbidding land in the world—a vast arc of repression. Vorkuta was probably the most important of these three as a killing ground for the socialist, anti-Stalinist opposition, and it is the one from which the most eyewitness testimonies have emerged, allowing us to piece together a picture of what occurred. The most detailed report—that of Khoroshev—did not reach the West until 1961. “In the mid- and late 1930s,” writes Khoroshev, “the Trotskyists in Vorkuta were a very patchwork group; some of them still called themselves Bolshevik-Leninists.”38 Khoroshev estimates that the “genuine Trotskyists” numbered “almost 500 at the mine, close to 1,000 at the camp of Ukhta-Pechora, and certainly several thousands altogether around the Pechora district.”39 Added to these, “there were in the camps of Vorkuta and elsewhere more than 100,000 prisoners who, members of the party and the youth, had adhered to the Trotskyist Opposition and then at different times and for diverse reasons … were forced to ‘recant their errors’ and withdraw from the Opposition.”40

While “the Trotskyists formed the only group of political prisoners who openly criticized the Stalinist ‘general line’ and offered organized resistance to the jailers,” Khoroshev tells us that organizing such resistance was difficult in the extreme.41 The labour of the inmates at the time—in contrast to later years, when the Vorkuta area was transformed into a massive mining complex—had little economic importance to the regime. As the terror began to bite in late 1936, the Trotskyists at Vorkuta launched a hunger strike—the last resort in any collective struggle. While the tactic had been used by other prisoners, the 1936 strike was the largest we know of in the camp system. According to Khoroshev, its leaders were Sokrat Gevorkian, an Armenian researcher formerly affiliated with what Khoroshev calls “the Institute of Human Sciences”; the student Karl Petrovich Mel'nais, who had led a Left Opposition group at the University of Moscow before his arrest in 1927; Vladimir Ivanov, an Old Bolshevik and former member of the Central Committee who had supported an oppositional faction known as the Group of Democratic Centralism; V. V. Kossior, who had occupied a senior managerial post in the petroleum industry; and Igor’ Poznanskii, formerly one of Trotsky’s secretaries. The strike was launched on 27 October 1936 to protest the second frame-up trials being staged in Moscow (with Kamenev and Zinoviev as the star prisoners) and was to involve a thousand prisoners over an agonizing four months.42 “Even the children persisted,” writes Berger, “although the strike leaders begged the mothers to stop them because the sight was intolerable to the men.”43

According to Solzhenitsyn, the strikers demanded, among other things, “separation of the politicals from the criminals; an eight-hour workday; the restoration of the special ration for politicals and the issuing of rations independently of work performance.”44 In his own account, Khoroshev’s summary of the demands is similar, except for one concerning special rations. According to Khoroshev, the hunger strikers insisted only that “the food quota of the prisoners should not depend on their norm of output. A cash bonus, not the food ration, should be used as a productive incentive.”45 After 132 agonizing days, the strikers received a “radiogram from the headquarters of the NKVD, drawn up in these words: ‘Inform the hunger strikers held in the Vorkuta mines that all their demands will be satisfied.’”46

This can only be considered a remarkable victory. Even more remarkably, it was not the first such victory. Solzhenitsyn reports that, before the Vorkuta strike, there was “a hundred-day strike somewhere in the Kolyma …: they demanded a free settlement instead of camps, and they won.”47 An anonymous survivor of Vorkuta mentions a 1934 hunger strike in the prison where he was before arriving at Vorkuta in which the strikers also won their principal demands.48 Yet both of these victories were, again, pyrrhic. The strikers at Kolyma, writes Solzhenitsyn, were “scattered among various camps, where they were gradually annihilated.”49 Elinor Lipper, a German socialist who was a prisoner in the Kolyma system, has documented massacres of communists at this time in Kolyma. According to Lipper, in 1937 and 1938, “all who were still capable of independent thinking and independent decisions, all those who still knew what the word socialism meant, who still had some idealism, all those whose vision of freedom was not yet distorted, were to be robbed of their influence and liquidated.”50

Lipper recalls that, in 1938, Stepan Nikolaivich Garanin visited the camps, “examining the list of counterrevolutionaries” and noting especially “those who were convicted of KRTD (counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity).” Garanin had assumed control of the Kolyma camps in 1937 and presided over his own reign of terror. At night, he would have the prisoners “driven in a herd out of the gate” where they would be “shot en masse under his personal supervision.” Many thousands of others, who escaped immediate execution, would be taken by truck to Serpantinka, which Lipper calls “one of the most ghastly institutions in the Soviet Union.”51 Its terrors were such that, even years later, survivors of this prison “were so gripped by the horror of it that they did not dare to tell their fellow prisoners of the inhumanity they had seen and experienced.” According to Lipper, “it was estimated that Garanin had the deaths of some twenty-six thousand persons on his conscience.”52

At Vorkuta, the task of annihilating the Trotskyists fell to Kashketin. “He had been granted extraordinary powers,” writes Vadim Rogovin, and he carried with him “order No. 00409. The significance of the order can be judged by the two zeroes, which were used only in cases when the order was undertaken on Stalin’s personal initiative.”53 A special prison camp was established at an abandoned brickworks, about twenty kilometres south of Vorkuta. In the dead of winter, the surviving hunger strikers and all other hardline Trotskyists in the surrounding prison camp system were settled there in appalling conditions. Solzhenitsyn provides a chilling description:

In the middle of the six-by-twenty-yard tent … stood one gasoline drum in place of a stove, for which one pail of coal per day was allotted, and in addition the zeks would throw their lice in to add a little to the heat. A thick layer of hoarfrost covered the inside of the canvas wall. There were not enough places on the bunks and the zeks took turns lying down and walking. They were given ten and a half ounces of bread a day and one bowl of gruel. Sometimes, though not every day, they were given a codfish. There was no water and they were given pieces of ice as part of the ration. It goes without saying, of course, that they were never able to wash themselves and that there was no bath. Patches of scurvy appeared on their bodies.54

These are the conditions in which the verbal newspaper Truth Behind Bars, described in the introductory chapter, was “published.”

The intellectual life of the imprisoned Trotskyists is one of the most impressive aspects of their doomed struggle against Stalinism. Ante Ciliga was a leading Yugoslav communist who, with Victor Serge, was one of the last Oppositionists to escape from the Gulag just before the mass executions began. In 1933, he was imprisoned in the Verkhne-Uralsk isolator. “Isolator” was the shorthand for special political prisons, used from 1921 until 1937 as detention centres for political prisoners. Jacques Rossi says they were used for all the Bolsheviks’ “former allies in the revolutionary struggle,” who he describes as “the SRs, Mensheviks, anarchists and the like, followed by the members of their very own party.”55 The isolator at Verkne-Uralsk was one of the most notorious. In an account written in Paris in 1936 and 1937, Ciliga recalled encountering two prisoner-produced journals at Verkhne-Uralsk, each reflecting different political currents.56

What a diversity of opinion there was, what freedom in every article! What passion and what candour, not only in the approach to theoretical and abstract questions, but even in matters of the greatest actuality. Was it still possible to reform the system by peaceful means, or was an armed rising, a new revolution required? Was Stalin a conscious or merely an unconscious traitor? Did his policy amount to reaction or to counter-revolution? Could he be eliminated by merely removing the directing personnel, or was a proper revolution necessary?57

The French-language version of Ciliga’s book says these journals were titled La verité en prison and Le Bolchevik militant —rendered respectively in the English translation as Pravda in Prison (Truth in Prison) and The Militant Bolshevik. New issues were published every month or two, with each of the ten to twenty articles printed separately in booklet form. The booklets were then combined into a “packet,” which “circulated from ward to ward.” Ciliga recalls that “the papers appeared in three copies, one copy for each prison wing.”58

Until very recently, it was believed that all trace of these underground prison publications had disappeared. However, in early 2018, while cell no. 312 was undergoing repairs at Verkne Uralsk, beneath the floorboards, a hidden cache was discovered, with 27 separate documents dating back to 1932 and 1933. They were in different states of preservation, some almost illegible.59 One document—“The Fascist Coup in Germany” from The Bolshevik-Leninist No. 2 (12)—written in 1933 after Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, has been deciphered and republished—the unexpected return of a silenced voice from the distant past.60

Ciliga published a Russian-language article on a portion of his time at Verkne-Uralsk in the 1938 issue of Sovremennyia zapiski (Modern notes), a journal published by exiled Social-Revolutionaries living in Paris. In that article, we read that the name in Russian of La verité en prison (“truth in prison”) was Pravda za reshetkoi (lit., “truth behind bars”).61 Some of the prisoners at the Brickworks were undoubtedly familiar with the printed Pravda za reshetkoi and adopted the same name for their oral “publication,” Truth Behind Bars.

Although resistance was possible in the 1930s—including this kind of “literary resistance”—victories could only be temporary and, again, ultimately pyrrhic. For the vast majority of the imprisoned Trotskyists, their “convictions” were in fact death sentences. Under Kashketin’s direction, the Vorkuta camps became the centre of extermination for the core of the Trotskyist opposition. At the end of March 1938, the first twenty-five prisoners were called up for transit. This “transit” was to the tundra, where they were shot and buried. According to Mikhail Baitalsky, “the first to be sentenced to death were all those who had taken part in the hunger strike.”62 Khoroshev gives a heart-rending description of “the executions in the tundra,” both in his early 1960s article and in a longer, more detailed 1978 account. Every day or two, a few dozen prisoners were taken away, but “on one occasion about a hundred people were called out of their tents … Twenty-six people were taken from our tent alone.” He goes on:

Several people from our tent and other tents refused to come out. When the guards entered the tents and began to remove the desperately resisting people, outside, where the “convoy” was gathering, you could hear voices, at first scattered and discordant, but then increasingly stronger and stronger. They were singing the “Internationale”. A minute later, almost simultaneously, the voices of our neighbouring tents joined in the chorus, and then, as if on command, our people joined in one mighty stream of menacing sounds. Huddled in the passage and standing on the upper bunks, they strained their voices as if their salvation depended upon it, singing furiously, menacingly and soulfully.63

The Brickworks’s guards, Khoroshev says, were rewarded with six months of leave at full pay. “They were promised money and holiday documents in Ust-Usa. However, when they arrived in groups in Ust-Usa they were arrested and shot.”64

“For thirty years now,” writes Baitalsky in his brilliant memoir, “the memory of the Vorkuta executions has been like an open wound inside me. The sentence … was established in Moscow according to a list. How many there were on the list of victims remains a secret even now, buried in the archives. It was approximately 900—maybe more.” This was Vorkuta’s part in the complete destruction of the core of the Left from the Russian Revolution, and according to Baitalsky, the executions there “pale before those at Kolyma.”65 According to Berger, “the same system was followed in all three camps”—Vorkuta, Noril’sk, and Kolyma. Lipper’s evidence from Kolyma, cited above, provides confirmation of that, at least for Kolyma. “By the end of 1937,” writes Berger, “hardly a member of the Trotskyist cadres was left in the three camps.”66 Broué’s account for Kolyma-Magadan is the most detailed for that camp. On 12 July, the Oppositionists in the camp launched a hunger strike that faced even more obstacles than the one in Vorkuta. Broué recounts that on 26 and 27 October and 4 November, a total of “87 hunger strikers … were condemned to death and executed.” Broué says that this was not all—that there were, in fact, “many other executions.”67

This extermination of the Trotskyists was the tip of the iceberg. By the end of the Great Terror in 1938, all the different sections of the party—from followers of Trotsky, to followers of Bukharin, to former loyal Stalinists—had been decimated by mass executions. According to Roy Medvedev, “the NKVD arrested and killed, within two years, more Communists than had been lost in all the years of the underground struggle, the three revolutions, and the Civil War.”68

Importantly, this was not the first round in the annihilation of the Left from 1917. I have already mentioned (and will document further below), the mass arrests and killings following the Kronstadt uprising of 1921, after which it was anathema to be considered an “anarchist.” Through the course of the 1920s, thousands of members of the party with historically the most support in the countryside, the Social-Revolutionaries, were driven underground, into exile and forced labour, and the party itself was ultimately destroyed. In the same decade, thousands of members of the party with historically the most support among urban workers, the RSDRP-Menshevik, suffered the same fate.69 Accompanying the destruction of the SRs was a disgraceful show trial in 1922, where to their shame, the Bolsheviks presided over staged mass demonstrations, demanding “death” for those on trial. Fortunately, one aspect of the 1930s show trials was not used. The accused were not tortured.70 Nine years later, the fourteen defendants at the so-called “Menshevik Trial” were not so fortunate. One of these, Mikhail Iakubovich from the Commissariat of Domestic Commerce, survived into the 1970s. In 1969 and 1970, he published in the Samizdat underground his recollections of the trial and the methods used by the secret police to extract confessions. Vera Broido’s summary of his report on the treatment of the defendants makes for difficult reading.

They [the defendants] were beaten about the head and face and on the genitals, kicked to the ground and stamped upon with heavy boots; they were throttled. Or else they were kept standing, without sleep, for many days and nights, while they were interrogated by shifts of chekists (the so-called “conveyor belt”); they were put, half naked and barefoot, into icy punishment cells; they were threatened with execution.71

In spite of this horrendous treatment, only one actual Menshevik ended up among the fourteen defendants. The rest of the arrested Mensheviks—including Vera Broido’s imprisoned mother, Eva Broido, then a woman in her early fifties—never appeared in the dock. In the words of Vera Broido: “Clearly only one of the real Mensheviks could be broken by torture.”72

The full story of the 1920s repression of the non-Bolshevik Left requires its own full treatment at a later date. But in this book, the reality of what happened to the anarchists, the SRs, and the Mensheviks needs to be visible, at least to the extent of these few paragraphs.

“Who Will Prevail?”

Stalin’s rise was opposed by many socialist workers and intellectuals, who found themselves grouped into various opposition categories, including followers of Leon Trotsky. The last acts of this opposition were the desperate hunger strikes in the far reaches of the Russian Arctic. The consolidation of Stalin’s power involved the physical elimination of the core of his own party, including those who called themselves Old Bolsheviks—followers of Lenin from before 1917. Those who called themselves Trotskyists, or seen to be followers of Leon Trotsky, were killed almost to a person, many of them meeting their fate in the Brickworks at Vorkuta. In The Time of Stalin, Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko (whose father was a leading Bolshevik and a primary figure in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917), describes the 1930s as a “historical epoch during which the vilest and bloodiest kind of evildoing flourished upon the earth.”73 Antonov-Ovseenko’s The Time of Stalin uses a method similar to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, organizing the story around oral testimony—a “wealth of personal testimonies … and oral accounts, by people who survived the Stalin era.” However, unlike Solzhenitsyn’s, Antonov-Ovseenko’s circle included some very senior figures from that era.74 One of these was Anastas Mikoyan—one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive in Communist Party leadership from the revolutionary era into the postwar era, and the only member of the Politburo to support Khruschev at the Party’s historic Twentieth Congress in 1956, when Khruschev began the process of exposing Stalin’s crimes.75 Drawing on oral accounts provided by Mikoyan, Antonov-Ovseyenko graphically illustrates the character of this counter-revolution. “The cells of the smaller prison at the Lubyanka were full to overflowing,” he writes, going on to recount a dialogue among the prisoners lying on the floor. One of them, an Italian woman, described what was happening in Russia as a “fascist coup.” She was executed in 1936.

That was the year the end came for Zinoviev and Kamenev too. Stalin was apparently afraid the death penalty might not actually be carried out against his two former allies. He sent Voroshilov to observe. This is what Voroshilov reported.

“They stood up in front of Stalin’s executioner.

Zinoviev (shouting): This is a fascist coup!

Kamenev: Stop it, Grisha. Be quiet. Let’s die with dignity.

Zinoviev: No. This is exactly what Mussolini did. He killed all his Socialist Party comrades when he seized power in Italy. Before my Death I must plainly state that what has happened in our country is a fascist coup!”76

If the events of 1917 to 1921 represented a partially successful attempt to install the rule of the working class, those of 1936 to 1938 represented the entirely successful attempt to consolidate the rule of the state bureaucrats grouped around Stalin. Trotsky struggled with the relationship between revolution and counter-revolution until his assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940. To his death, he maintained that some remnants of workers’ power remained in Russia. He argued that, although distorted by Stalinism, the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state (if a degenerated one) because it remained in the control of the Communist Party. “If the party were excluded from the Soviet system, then the whole system would soon collapse,” he wrote in 1930. “Freed from the control of the party, the trusts would immediately be converted into first, state capitalist, then, private capitalist enterprises.”77

However, inside this party on which all depended, he said, “there are dispersed the elements of two parties.”

From the official party there is emerging a party of the counter-revolution, whose elements exist at various stages of maturity. A symmetrical process is taking place at the opposite, at the proletarian pole of the party, above all, in the form of the Left Opposition…. The main question is: who will prevail? It will be immediately decided, not by the economic statistics of the socialist and capitalist economic tendencies, but by the relation of forces between the proletarian and Thermidorean flanks of the present so-called party.78

The events at Vorkuta, replicated in the even more remote camps of Noril’sk and Kolyma, made it absolutely clear who would prevail. The party of counter-revolution physically eliminated the Left Opposition—and every other organized leftist group then current in the Soviet Union. Following Trotsky’s own logic, these hard facts would signify the final act in the destruction of any remnants of the attempt to construct a workers’ state. Trotsky did not, and could not, know the scale of the destruction of the old Marxist cadres in the Soviet Union. Since most eyewitness reports of the extermination camps only reached the West in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, an earlier generation, left with a paucity of information, had some illusions about what was transpiring in the Soviet Union. But we now know the extent of the destruction of the socialist, anti-Stalinist opposition. With this knowledge, it seems abundantly clear that the events of 1936 to 1938 completed the counter-revolution.